Radiographic imaging devices are widely used to obtain information about internal structures of a structure of interest e.g. a human body. Excellent visibility of relevant anatomical and pathological structures is required in high quality radiographic images. Image enhancement, and more specifically multi scale image decomposition, is commonly used for that purpose. Herein, the radiographic image is decomposed into a plurality of (spatial) band pass images (also referred to as frequency bands). That is, since the size of certain structures (e.g. trabeculae in bone images, nodules in chest images and microcalcifications in digital mammograms) has a distribution around some characteristic structure length, visibility of those structures can be enhanced if one or more such frequency bands, adapted to the structure size distribution at hand, are either amplified or suppressed. More in particular an image enhancement curve is applied to the decomposed frequency band pass images to amplify or suppress certain frequency bands.
DE19849090 (A1) discloses enhancing mutually separate i.e. single frequency bands after multi scale image decomposition.
A problem of the known methods is in their inability to enhance a plurality of frequency bands resulting from a multi-scale image decomposition in a manner that is efficient for clinical diagnosis.